The contract for a massive NHS email system is up for grabs under a £350m government IT pitch.
The Crown Commercial Service has published a tender calling on providers of cloud-based email services to submit their bids for a two-year contract to run the next version of NHSMail.
NHSMail is the national email and director …

Re: Any of those "clouds" in the UK?

The wonders of tenders

The contract is to run for 2 years, can you imagine all the setup costs that have to be included in a 2 year contract to support 1/2m accounts and that's not including the capital cost of systems if the system can't just be deployed to current cloud services.

The only real winner is going to be Microsoft yet again via all the licence fees they will be charging.

Re: The wonders of tenders

Actually, I don't understand the "20 suppliers" part. They want to split the mail service up over 20 different providers? With different mail systems? Calendar interoperability and directory services would become a nightmare. Or are they splitting the platform into different bits? Mail, directory, etc, going to different vendors? If so, who gets to host it all?

The previous version was better and still runs

Not Quite Right

As I understand it the framework is for the entirety of the public sector, not just NHSmail. The data will be housed in the UK in accordance with Government policies. There's a better description on the EHI site: